K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

omg swfdec ftw!

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

Another side note regarding my recent Intrepid adventure — out of curiosity (and after hearing positive murmurs from elsewhere on the Intarnets) I installed swfdec instead of the proprietary flash driver, and for my purposes it’s just as good as Adobe’s.

Of course, I’m not a YouTuber — videos there are a little stuttery, and probably not acceptable for anyone who’s life revolves around watching antlions walk backwards. That could be my ultra-slow 1Ghz machine though, running the free nv driver. But I really only care about the stats graphs on WordPress.com, which don’t require much effort, but as you can see, work fine.

As far as ease of installation, Intrepid’s Firefox asked me if I wanted to install swfdec and held my hand while it put it into place. I had to restart the browser for it to take effect, but after that everything was, again, peas and carrots.

So now you have two options (swfdec and gnash) for dodging Adobe’s plan to take over the Internet. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Hey, thanks for the cheer-up, glad you like my software.
Swfdec currently has 3 major problems:
1. Flash 9 (Vimeo uses it)
2. Video served using Adobe’s own RTMP instead of HTTP (BBC)
3. X server performance (speed depends heavily on your graphics card and quality of drivers)
People are working on solving all 3 of them.

PS: Swfdec doesn’t do Hulu.com yet – I forgot why though. But I’m pretty sure we have a bug about it in our bugzilla.